


Queen of Shadows

by maplemood



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 10:16:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19926451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Under the Thief’s eyes shadow and stone had become flesh again; Attolia hadn’t felt her own body for some time before then, and she couldn’t stop feeling it for a long time afterwards.





	Queen of Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure anyone who's been in the fandom for any length of time has their own version of the wedding night fic; here's mine.

_“I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.”_

— Catherynne M. Valente, _Deathless_

**I.**

She was betrothed at fifteen and crowned at seventeen, and in the year between she was a stone, a statue, a wisp of smoke and a voiceless shadow. She was whatever her betrothed wished her to be, dumb and pliant as an ox; for sixteen years she had been whatever others wished her to be. 

(“You are my daughter.” A tired voice, a tired old man wishing to be rid of her.

Her voice, still and cold: “Yet I mean nothing to you.”

“Irene. It isn’t the will of the gods, daughters questioning their fathers.” _Least of all you, my daughter._

Silence. Unbending, unbroken.

“One day you will understand.” A sigh dry as the wind through summer grass. “When your husband sits on the throne and wars have made you both old before your time, you’ll understand.”)

When she was sixteen she sat at her betrothed’s hearth. Silent, she listened to his plans, his schemes and his ugly little ambitions; silent, she stood with her back to the wall and endured the probing of his thick fingers. Silently she presented herself to him every morning and silently she retreated every night; silent, she lowered her eyes and waited.

( _You will understand—_ she’d always understood. It was her father who mistook understanding for forgiveness.)

When she was seventeen her father died, and she was married, and she sat for the wedding feast and watched her husband choke to death and afterwards slept soundly for the first time in over a year. Waking alone in the great bed, she smoothed a palm over the ridges of her collarbone, the slices of her ribs. She cupped the same hand over her heart and wondered, cooly, why she wasn’t trembling. Why, knowing all she’d done and was about to do, she didn’t shudder, let alone weep.

Silently, she closed her eyes and sank into herself. Past rock-solid layers of fury and disgust, past all her carefully frozen sorrow, she searched for any hidden piece of softness, a sticking place wormed into the center. Her center, and reaching it she clenched her eyes and fists—

—And opened them, having found nothing at all.

**II.**

_Like a statue._

_Rather take one of those to bed—wouldn’t slit your throat while you slept, would it?_

“Hmm. I’ve never favored knives,” Attolia said. She waited for Relius’s smile. When it appeared, sharp and reluctant, she didn’t return it. 

There were other things whispered, some better, some worse. Rumors of what she must have done to her betrothed, to her father, even to her brother—one king and two men who could have been king dead so the Shadow Princess could sit on the throne. The truth had an ugly tinge to it; perhaps that was why Attolia let the stories spread for the most part unchecked.

Or they spread because a shadow had no body. It couldn’t be caught or owned, poisoned or pinned to a marriage bed. It could loom huge in the darkness, terrifying, if just for a moment, the hardest of men. A shadow wasn’t loved. It could appear anywhere.

Carefully, Attolia built up her network of spies. Carefully, she watched every man and woman who set foot in her palace, and though she knew many watched her in return she did not suspect him, or know him, until it was too late. 

About a month after the debacle of Hamaithes’s Gift she woke knowing the Thief of Eddis had slipped into her room while she slept. Ever thoughtful, he’d left a sprig of olive leaves next to an amphora of Attolia’s favorite hair oil and slipped out without waking her. It was only hours later that the awareness permeated her dreams along with the scent of the fresh leaves.

The Thief was a boy. A sharp-edged boy with the hopeful eyes and arrogant grin of a child, and he had seen her sleeping. Her coverlet, rumpled or perhaps twitched back, her bare arms. The spill of her hair across the pillow, the swell of her breath. The intimacy of it, unasked for, ungiven, choked her.

 _You are more beautiful, but she is more kind._ Had anyone asked, Attolia was sure she could have told them his words meant nothing to her—sure, but only just. As the Guard combed fruitlessly through the palace, she remembered the Thief’s voice in a cold stab of fury: _You are more beautiful._

He’d sounded, by some measure, genuine. His eyes had flickered over her as though she were not Attolia or even the Shadow Princess, as though she were Irene and nothing more than Irene, a girl loose-haired and barefoot in the grass. Blooming, flushed uncertain with it. Under the Thief’s eyes shadow and stone had become flesh again; Attolia hadn’t felt her own body for some time before then, and she couldn’t stop feeling it for a long time afterwards. 

She was smoothing her palm along her collarbone. Attolia stopped.

“What if he comes back?” the youngest of her attendants whispered from the wardrobe, where she assumed the queen wouldn’t hear her. “If—”

“If he does,” Attolia interrupted, her voice cutting, “he’s a greater fool than I gave him credit for.”

Yet it throbbed, if not at her center then close enough, if not a softness then something too close. A flush simmering like the ones she’d felt as a girl, unease scraped over the first soft unfurlings of desire. 

It was nothing, Attolia told herself. Nothing but an echo of sensations long gone stirred up by a pair of insolent eyes. Even as a girl, she’d known she wasn’t beautiful, only awkward and later forbidding. As for kindness, a soft heart rarely ruled a country. The Thief might have understood that if his country, and his queen, hadn’t loved him from the moment of his birth.

**III.**

If. 

_If he does he’s a greater fool than I gave him credit for._

_Anything. I’ll do anything, steal anything, if only you let me go._

If.

_Who am I, Eugenides?_

***

Her voice, very still: “Who am I, that you should love me?”

***

“You are my Queen.”

**IV.**

For sixteen years she’d been whatever others wished her to be, and for all the years after Attolia had been whatever she needed to be, that and nothing more. Now she found that the softness she’d forced inside herself, locked away and ignored during those years was no easier to call back. Stone couldn’t melt into flesh, at least never so quickly as the gods would have Attolia believe.

Never so quickly as he’d once allowed her to believe. She folded her arms across the front of her dressing gown. “Eugenides.”

“One moment, my dear.” Her husband fumbled with the leather straps securing his hook to the stump of his arm. Outside dusk had fallen, and inside the bedchamber was almost as dim, lit by guttering lamps. Romantic, and fitting for a wedding night, but hardly practical. Especially for a one-handed man undoing a multitude of buckles and straps.

 _If only I’d thought of wedding nights._ The thought was as dry as Attolia’s mouth.

“I’d say I’m sorry for the inconvenience.” Eugenides spoke up as if he’d heard it. “And I suppose I am sorry that you have only yourself to blame for it, my Queen.”

His tone was gently mocking, the anger, if there was any, buried deep. She’d heard the same tone several times before ordering his hand chopped off, and it had always set her teeth on edge. “Let me do it,” Attolia snapped.

The dimness proved just as impractical for a two-handed woman; she fumbled worse than he had. “Gods all damn it,” Eugenides finally snarled, “let me—”

“Gods damn you. Hold still—”

“Were you my cousin Boagus in another life? Because you have the heaviest hands of any woman I’ve ever—”

“My executioner has a lighter touch, if you’d prefer—”

When the hook finally slid off the sight of his bare stump didn’t sting as much as it once had, if only because this time Attolia held the weight of her choice, its leather straps slithering over her arms like snakes. She set the hook on a bedside table, then turned back to her husband. Eugenides met her eyes as he always had, his own missing nothing, excusing nothing. Condemning nothing, for all that. “My dear,” he said, his voice that of a man come home to his bride.

It gritted at her throat like ash. “Don’t.”

“Irene—”

“You were always kind to me.”

“Not always.”

“Always kinder than I deserved.” Shadow and stone, both or neither: Attolia no longer knew what she was. If she’d ever known.

“Then let me be kinder.”

Impossible man. “Eugenides.”

“Irene.”

**V.**

It was quick, a matter of minutes before he lay spent in her arms. Spent and near-feverish, his skin hot to the touch where it had chafed against hers, and Attolia thought how strange it was, strange and terrible, that the gods had given her such power over this man, to cut and burn, to bring the Thief of Eddis to tears in her dungeons and between her legs.

 _The scales won’t tip your way again,_ she reminded herself, suddenly bitter. _Don’t pretend he doesn’t hold the same power over you._ Years of her life, Attolia thought, had been wasted in pretending.

She shifted underneath him. “My King.”

“Mmm.” Eugenides stirred. “I’m crushing you, aren’t I?” He heaved himself upright, the dampness around his eyes gleaming in the leftover lamplight, his left hand a reassuring weight on Attolia’s ribs. His fingers drumming softly against them, he sat beside her a long time. For a long time Attolia forced herself to meet his eyes. Finally, Eugenides bent—awkwardly, his right arm planted but wobbling—to kiss her. “You didn’t feel it,” he said.

She reached out to steady him. “I felt you. It was enough.”

“You know it wasn’t.”

“It’s a start,” Attolia said quellingly. Gooseflesh prickled down her ribs. “You’re tired,” she snapped. “Go to sleep.”

“Sleep?” Eugenides scoffed. “With all due respect, my Queen, that was tiring. Not exhausting.” 

“Perhaps you’d like to sleep in the receiving room, then.”

“Perhaps.”

Attolia heard the dry hiss of his sigh and sighed herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, the apology, as always, inconsequential in her ears.

Their bedstead creaked. “I’m sorry, too.” His voice was soft, nearly a boy’s voice, nearly the voice of the Thief who’d met her eyes and seen nothing of the queen in them. “I am tired,” Eugenides said, “and I’d rather fall asleep next to you.”

 _Let me be kinder._ “Are you not my King?” Attolia smoothed her palm up the trembling muscles of his right arm. “My father,” she began, then stopped herself and began again. “I was betrothed when I was very young,” she said, as if Eugenides might have forgotten. “My betrothed cared very little for me, and I think—I think I began to care very little for myself.”

Stone and shadow. She hadn’t felt herself until she felt him, or if she had it had been an echo, a fleeting unsubstance as cold as she’d grown to be. It hadn’t been Irene who danced barefoot in the grass; but perhaps there’d never been such an Irene.

Their bedstead creaked again as Eugenides shifted his weight, then groaned and lowered himself to lie beside her. “You and I are what we are,” Attolia said, her voice harsh. She didn’t turn to look at him. “What did you think, that we could change?”

“In time.”

“In time,” she repeated. “We’ll find it very hard. I will, at least. He called me a shadow, and I was a shadow and a stone. Nothing more.”

His hand cupped to the base of her neck. Very gently, Eugenides turned her towards himself. His eyes were darker in the lamplight. Hollow, yet not empty. “Am I not your King?” he asked, half-smiling, half painfully earnest. 

Gooseflesh prickling, their coverlet bunched useless at her feet, Attolia realized she was trembling. “You are my husband,” she said at last. 

**VI.**

It was slower this time and no less fumbling, fumbling in a way that reminded her of soft grass and bare feet, lovers sprawled beneath the trees. Soft, and Attolia closed her eyes, sinking within herself, and when she opened them she saw her husband’s face, and in his eyes her own. 

“Eugenides—”

Stone couldn’t melt into flesh. Not but for the will of the gods, or the will of a patient touch.

**Author's Note:**

> Assume that at some point afterwards Gen brought up the whole, "Babe, we've gotta talk about halving your Guard," issue and inkwells were thrown.


End file.
